Accidents Will Happen
By Ken Pisani
The funeral repast for Carl Weston was an intimate affair befitting his few friends, a small gathering just off the kitchen where he’d suddenly dropped dead. The Williamses from next door, a colleague from work, and close neighborhood friends of Claire, his widow. Their son, Danny, who years ago had moved as far away as possible, returned with Joanne, the new wife Carl and Claire had never met.
“You’re so far away,” Claire told them over mac and cheese brought by her neighbor, Becca, “If you decide to have children, I’d love to know my grandkids a little.”
“Of course,” Joanne said, while Danny displayed a look on his face that conveyed the opposite. “Although we’re not planning a family right now.”
“What is it they say about plans, it’s what happens while life is busy?”
“‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans,’” Danny corrected her, masticating a gob of cheesy macaroni.
And death, Claire thought. Children. Weather. Presidents, cats and dogs. Leaks, car repairs, a hole in the roof. Really, everything happens while you’re making plans. It’s not a very good saying, she realized. Not at all precise.
“How are you doing, girl?” her friend Winnie asked, leaning down and hugging her from behind. Claire didn’t need to turn to know who it was, and that Bob would be with her.
“Danny, you remember Winnie and Bob?”
“It’s been a minute,” he replied.
“I’m so sorry about your dad.”
“That Becca’s mac and cheese?” Bob asked, heading to the kitchen before anyone could answer.
“Hey, can Becca still do that thing?” Danny asked.
“She hasn’t shown off in a while, but I assume so.”
Danny explained to his wife that Becca had one of those memories that could recite pi into the thousands of digits, and also knew what day of the week any date in history fell on.
“That’s amazing,” Joanne said.
“Yeah, well, the pi trick is a little boring,” Danny clarified. “I mean, she’s just reciting numbers and it goes on forever.”
“Ten thousand-some digits once,” Claire recalled. “Won some kind of memory championship.”
“Hey, Becca,” Danny called her over. “My birthdate, September 17, 1994.”
“He doesn’t even say hello,” Becca shrugs. “I’m just some parlor trick.”
“I said, ‘Hey.’”
“You were born on a Saturday.”
“He was,” Claire confirmed.
“December 11, 1931,” Danny continued.
“A Friday.”
“First Independence Day.”
“July 4th 1776 was a Thursday.”
Joanne looked it up on her phone, remarking, again, “Amazing!”
“The day the music died,” he teased her.
“Don’t make me recite pi to the ten thousandth digit,” Becca smiled, excusing herself.
Danny and his wife didn’t stay overnight. Work, he claimed. Before they left, Joanne hugged Claire a beat longer than her son did. Winnie stayed to help clean up, scraping plates whose patterns had worn away, filling the dishwasher and packing food wordlessly. Claire had friends who crowded the air with talk (Becca leapt to mind), and she appreciated Winnie’s quiet company. Quiet meant you were thinking, about anything and possibly everything, while talking meant you were thinking only of the thing about which you were currently speaking. Claire preferred the company of thoughtful people in the literal sense to the one that meant considerate.
She offered coffee but Winnie suggested wine, noting the surprisingly good bottle of pinot noir someone had brought. Likely regifted, Claire recalled the term. When Claire struggled with the corkscrew, Winnie intervened and opened it with ease and the muscle memory of ten thousand bottles across her lifetime. She poured heavily, and toasted.
“Well,” Winnie finally said, “this must be a relief.”
Claire almost spit her pinot.
“It is,” she said, feeling her whole body relax.
“They always say, ‘This person or that didn’t deserve to die.’ And maybe Carl didn’t. But what did he do that he deserved to live?”
Claire considered Carl’s relative innocence. Are there any innocent men? They’re all guilty of something.
“He was unappreciative,” Winnie continued. “Of you, of everything.”
“He used to refer to my age as ‘the wrong side of fifty.’”
“Horrible! And him, on the wrong side of sixty. What an asshole.”
“Mean,” Claire agreed, sipping her wine and savoring it. “Lazy and kind of stupid. I know it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead . . .”
“But how about truthfully? That should be allowed,” she said, and Claire knew a hard truth was in the offing. “What I wouldn’t give for Bob to be gone.”
“That’s the wine talking. Bob is a much better husband than Carl was. If it were Bob who died . . .?”
“From your lips, etc. . . .” Winnie interrupted.
“I couldn’t even get Carl to come to your house with me.”
“Oh, what a comfort! He stayed in the kitchen, stuffing his fat face with Becca’s mac and cheese and brownies. And then more mac and cheese! It was disgusting to watch. And he took the car, leaving me to Uber home.”
Claire knew that when you stopped loving someone, you usually stopped liking them too, and that most of what they did repelled you. Their laugh, the mouth breathing, scratching that spot. Eating mac and cheese and brownies and then more mac and cheese.
“That’s hardly a reason to wish him dead.”
Winnie drained her glass. “Remember my fender bender a couple of weeks ago?”
“Your poor face!”
“Wasn’t no fender I bent,” Winnie said, filling her glass. “Bob hit me. Twice.”
She poured more wine for Claire, easily, Claire’s hand frozen in place.
“He apologized the next morning,” Winnie continued. “Although he did make it my fault for ‘yammering.’”
“You don’t yammer,” Claire protested. “And even if you did . . .”
“Right? In fairness, I was in the middle of ripping him a new one.”
“Bob could use a new one.”
Winnie laughed and Claire, flush with wine, hugged her friend, spilling pinot on the couch.
“Careful!”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Carl’s not here to yell at me. And we need a new couch! I’m going to buy a new one in the morning. I’m going to buy the nicest goddamn couch, and a hundred frilly cushions to pile all over it.”
“I’ll come with,” Winnie giggled, and they didn’t speak again of Bob that night.
A few days later, Claire asked Bob if he might help her with the garage door that had ceased functioning properly. In fact, nothing in the garage was working, including the washer-dryer that had emptied buckets of water across the garage floor. Bob was only too happy to play hero to their recently widowed neighbor, and Winnie was equally happy to be rid of him for the afternoon. On arrival, the source of the electrical problem seemed obvious, a phalanx of shredded wires pulled from their PVC housing.
“Christ, what happened?”
Claire shrugged, suggesting, “Raccoons?”
“Only if you found a dead one,” Bob surmised.
He headed around the side of the house, turned off the circuit breaker to the garage and went to work. But only for a minute.
While Sheriff Ramona Vargas didn’t necessarily consider it a crime scene, she was nonetheless unhappy to find things so haphazard. the EMTs had made a mess of things, traipsing through the garage and dragging Bob’s body out of the water to attempt CPR. There wasn’t really much from which the sheriff might excavate even perfunctory evidence of what might have happened. Not even a chalk outline to go by.
“Was the gentleman blasted clear into the driveway,” she asked, “or did you all help him a little?”
The EMTs knew her question to be both rhetorical and sarcasm. Before she could head inside, they explained to the sheriff that they’d been called here not two weeks ago when the man who lived here had dropped dead suddenly in the kitchen, flattening his face all to hell. Sheriff Vargas found the recent widow in a near-catatonic state in that same kitchen. She didn’t have much to say, and the sheriff didn’t have much to ask about a victim too dumb to turn off a circuit breaker before working on an electrical problem while standing in water. She left to notify the newly minted widow, Winnie, who, after a few necessary formalities, joined Claire to finish another bottle of wine. Claire resisted asking her if she felt relieved, and Winnie fell asleep on the new couch surrounded by pillows.
Claire placed a blanket over her, and her friend mumbled, “Thank you.”
A week after Bob’s funeral, Winnie stopped by with yet another bottle of wine. And a puppy.
“Oh, if that isn’t just the cutest thing,” Claire yelped, thinking she might burst into tears at the sight of him.
“He’s a rescue,” Winnie told her. “I got in and out quick as I could, before I walked away with ten more.”
“Look at those paws! He’s going to be big.”
“I could use a guard dog now that I’m alone.”
“What’s his name?”
“They called him Furball,” Winnie said, handing the bottle to Claire. “I’m thinking of changing it to Thor.”
“Ooh, this looks like a good bottle,” Claire could tell by its label.
“Fifty-five bucks.”
“That’s quite the splurge.”
Claire reached for the corkscrew. She was getting better at this.
“I came into some money,” Winnie said.
“Insurance?”
Before Winnie could answer, Claire’s doorbell rang again. It was Becca.
“I was driving home and I saw Winnie’s car and . . . OMG, you got a puppy!”
“He’s Winnie’s. Come in, we’re about to open a nice bottle of wine.”
“Aren’t you just the cutest thing?”
“That’s what I said!”
Becca scooped the dog up in both arms, and he licked her face like it was ice cream while Claire pulled a third glass and poured.
“Bob would never let me get a dog, perm my hair, or sleep with other men.”
“One down, two to go,” Claire said, and clinked Winnie’s glass.
Becca sipped and they all sat, the little dog scooting off her lap to sniff around the couch. “This is so nice,” Becca said, noticing the new couch, and then burst into tears.
“Oh, honey, what’s the matter?” Claire tried to console her.
“You’re both so lucky,” she sobbed, fishing in her purse for a tissue. “I know. That’s a terrible thing to say . . . but Freddy’s cheating again.”
The again was unnecessary. Everyone knew Freddy was notoriously unfaithful to Becca. He slept with neighbors and women he met in bars, and much younger women he paid for. This time, he’s given Becca an STD.
“I’m so humiliated,” she cried some more, and Claire refilled her glass. Claire wondered if Becca’s incredible memory made things worse—if every terrible thing Freddy had done to her was catalogued alongside the days and dates and digits of pi, vivid and impossible to forget.
A welder by profession, Freddy was going to be easier for Claire to kill than both Bob and Carl.
Carl wasn’t the worst husband, Claire had tried to convince herself. Surely there were worse. In addition to his negligence of her, he was utterly and exhaustingly certain in his opinions. He was both a boor and boring. But in Claire’s experience, all this was true in general of husbands. A list of Carl’s faults would have exhausted the lined pad with the smiling realtor’s face; but once, to remind herself why she’d married him, Claire attempted a list of her husband’s good qualities and could only manage HEARTY APPETITE and SLEEPS SOUNDLY. The attributes of a walrus. Goo goo g’joob?
Carl also moped when things didn’t go his way, like when the doctor told him his cholesterol was staggeringly high. That was when Claire decided to kill him. Did that make her a bad person? Surely there were worse. Claire was no longer young, but barring accidents or unpredictable illness, she had thirty or so good years left and did not want to spend them like this, with Carl.
“What do doctors know?” she’d told him. “Aunt Ruthie smoked for seventy years and lived to ninety-two.”
This consoled Carl a little, both the rationale and Claire’s solidarity against the medical advice he wished to ignore.
“Yeah, screw the doctors,” he said, and she forced a conspiratorial laugh.
The heavy chocolate frosted layer cake she baked for him that night offered further consolation. Claire then began a regimen of meals that relied heavily on ingredients of palm oil, shortening, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, butter sticks, heavy cream, and salt. (If she’d known how to procure Sodium Nitrates, Butylated Hydroxyanisole, or Red Dye #3, Claire would have added them to her deep-fried fat-saturated menu). Her own food, she baked, drizzling it with olive oil so it resembled Carl’s grease-soaked meal. Claire also replaced his nighttime statin with her own Ambien—both white and capsule shaped—and slept soundly without it, knowing Carl would soon be gone.
He was, before Christmas.
Bob presented more of a challenge. He wasn’t as prone to sloth and appeared heathy. But an accident, that was possible. Claire had done some Googling at the library (she knew better than to leave a digital trail to her own Dell home computer) and learned that 65 percent of all unnatural deaths were a result of preventable and accidental injuries: falls, poisoning, choking, drowning, fire, auto accidents, bug stings and bites. She was unsurprised to learn that males made up the majority of these by a margin of three to one. Men likely believed themselves more capable than they were, and were also more easily incited to conflict resulting in sometimes fatal injury. (The category, “struck by,” defined as “a strike by or against an object or other person,” was nearly 90 percent male. Although as evidenced by Winnie, women too were struck. Most often, by men.)
She’d played the helpless widow card with Bob, first emptying plenty of water from her washer-dryer across the garage floor, and turning off the circuit breaker before pulling the PVC conduit from the electrical box and shredding some wires. When Bob started working inside the garage, it was pure guesswork for Claire, outside, as to when he might be properly exposed to the open wiring while standing in the highly conductive puddle she’d poured. She counted, randomly, to fifty and flipped the circuit back on, holding it there against its reflexive shut off. Releasing it after about half a minute, she headed inside the garage to find Bob on his back. She looked at him, upside down, eyes open, a little smoky. She’d felt a twinge of guilt, until she recalled Winnie’s injuries to the right side of her face, caused by Bob’s left hand, now charred black.
“Please, forgive me for what I said,” Becca continued, composing herself. “I’m a wreck.”
Claire was torn between understandable shock at the sentiment and her miff at the notion that luck had anything to do with their improved circumstances. Maybe Winnie was lucky; but Claire did the work.
“No, you’re right,” Winnie agreed, scooping up the hyperactive puppy. “I’m going to tell you both something . . . but you can’t tell another soul.”
“What is it?”
“Really! I could go to jail.”
Now Claire’s curiosity was piqued; she thought she had by far the biggest secret in the room.
“I paid a man $10,000 to kill Bob.”
Everyone fell silent, even Furball/Thor.
“To a man named George I met in a bar. George!” she chuckled. “No one looked less like a George than this swarthy . . . I don’t know, Israeli? Spaniard? But handsome! A biker I met in the worst roadside dive bar you’ve ever seen,” Winnie continued. “The kind you see with a line of motorcycles out front, and keep driving.”
“Did you go there to . . .? “
“I did. It was like ordering a pizza. And then Bob dies, here, by accident,” she shrugged, and swirled her wine around her glass before taking another gulp. “I gave ‘George’ $5,000 up front. The way I look at it, I saved $5,000. On the other hand, I spent five for no reason. What’s the protocol here? Do I ask for it back?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Becca offered.
“Let’s take a little trip. My treat,” she offered. “After all, I’m $5,000 richer than expected.”
“Maybe you should give it to me,” Claire said.
Winnie stared at her a beat, then snorted a laugh.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Becca laughed along.
When Claire didn’t return the laugh, both stopped suddenly.
“I’m going to tell you something,” Claire repeated, “and I hope you’re not mad at me.”
They finished a second bottle and opened a third while Claire told them everything. Did Winnie already know? Claire was certain she did, but thought it would be rude to ask. She was concerned about Becca, until Becca mused aloud that her unfaithful, priapic husband, Freddy, with his sloppy habits around welding equipment, would be easy pickings. Claire had already pondered which of their other friends and neighbors she could help rid of ungrateful and abusive husbands. It would be as easy as getting them up a ladder or under a car. She knew bleach mixed with ammonia created chorine gas, and how to clog a chimney. Pilot lights were easy to extinguish while dryer lint was flammable as hell. Toilet bowl and drain cleaners could be explosive. Every home, Claire knew, held the means to eliminate its occupant as efficiently as the kid in Home Alone: rickety basement steps, poison under the sink, combustible aerosol cans. Throw rugs on polished wood? You might as well put out bear traps. Kitchens filled with knives and cleavers, garages hung with axes and chainsaws alongside gasoline-powered generators and turpentine cans. And too many burning, scented candles.
Some of the husbands Claire knew actively courted disaster in the form of hobbies: Jim Casey used a table saw, Bobby DiGerolomo kept snakes, Jason Armano kept a loaded shotgun, “just in case.” Outside the home, Neal Madnick liked ice fishing, Jed Coen piloted a leaky boat, and Brad Weissman ran his hot tub too damn hot. And they all did so while drunk as pirates.
One week later, when Sheriff Ramona Vargas arrived to interview Becca Williams about the death of her husband, Fred, in a welding accident, she was surprised to find the couple lived right next door to the scene of the accidental electrocution just a couple of weeks ago . . . at the home of yet another recent widow. What were the odds? She was disappointed to discover Williams was away on vacation. In the sheriff’s experience, it was not uncommon for the bereaved to seek comfort in escape from everyday reminders of a lost loved one; usually, they visited adult children or other relatives, or sought the isolation of a cruise. She was, however, taken aback to learn that Ms. Williams had, in the company of the other two recent widows, headed to Vegas.
Sheriff Vargas didn’t automatically assume the worst—murder—but she was trained to consider it. Only the deep love that compelled two people to pledge their lives together could curdle into the kind of hate that made one want to bump off the other. She knew love and hate are commonly mistaken for opposites when they’re really two sides of the same coin, and on any given day across years of marriage that coin can come up heads or tails with equal ease. It was Ramona’s opinion that the best time to leave a husband was before marrying him. Certainly before you hated him. Everything was made more complicated by hate, from jobs to neighbors to broccoli. You can’t make a healthy emotional break from something when your burning desire is to sabotage or punish it, or wonder why it existed in the first place; your workplace will survive whatever petty obstruction you can muster, your neighbors aren’t going anywhere, and broccoli will always be broccoli. If you hate something, set it free.
Ramona could wait for this widows club to return from their midlife gambling spree before cornering them independently for questioning. In the meantime, she’d do a little digging into their husbands.
Claire had matched Winnie’s $5,000 with five of her own and the three departed for Las Vegas, where they checked into an expensive suite of rooms and marveled at the view. Thor, too, had joined their party; all it took was an overnighted “service dog” vest from an Amazon vendor and a $200 deposit on the suite. The hotel and casino had fourteen bars and restaurants, three live shows, 24-hour shopping, and a wedding chapel if anyone felt inclined to repeating that mistake. Wild horses couldn’t drag them to the pool, populated exclusively by taut twenty-something bodies romping like drunken seals to music the women couldn’t recognize. The spa, however, was delightfully quiet and served champagne, and no one would openly judge their own worn, rucked bodies.
They went to see Dead & Company at the Sphere, where they scored mushrooms and danced in the aisles singing along to the choruses they remembered, like Come hear Uncle John’s band and I know you Rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone. Returning to the casino, still on extraordinary highs and singing, Truckin’. . . got my chips cashed in, all agreed they were not ready to cash in their chips. They sat in a row at a blackjack table where Becca, with her astonishing memory and ability to recognize patterns, perhaps enhanced by the psychotropic effects of mushrooms, realized she could count cards deep into an eight-deck shoe.
“Lots of picture cards left . . .” she grinned, ordering a round of gin and tonics for the table.
“You go, Raingirl,” Winnie cheered.
In no time at all, they turned $5,000 worth of chips into fifteen, then soon tripled that, adding five more for good measure before calling it quits. They put a ribbon on the night by corralling three eager and willing sex partners on their way back to their suite—Becca, a croupier leaving his shift, and Winnie, choosing to pay a professional, while Claire got lucky meeting a handsome gambler locked out of his room when she roamed the hallway in search of ice.
Claire was the first to awaken the next morning, having never felt simultaneously so bad and so good. She was pleased to see her conquest—Taylor, was that his name?—still sleeping soundly beside her. A few minutes later, Winnie entered through the shared living room, snuggling her puppy and draining a two-liter bottle of very expensive hotel water.
“Yours is still here?” she said, noting the still slumbering form next to Claire.
“Yours left?”
“When you pay for it, they don’t stick around to cuddle.”
Thor began to bark at the man and he stirred and sat up, stretching and yawning cartoonishly. He smiled at Winnie.
“George . . .?” she said.
“George?” Claire repeated, confused. “You said your name was Taylor.”
“Actually,” the man continued to grin, “it’s Zach.”
Zach (aka George, the hitman) had been understandably disappointed to lose the full payday when his contract, Bob, turned up dead by electrocution. Zach’s own fault, really; he’d delayed killing Bob in favor of an easy hit on a lawyer to quash a racketeering investigation against a friend of a friend. Although the timeliness of that hit was certainly more critical, Zach had also made the mistake of relating more to the criminal understandably trying to avoid prison than the woman who sought him out at the bar, just another disgruntled housewife. A little judgey, Zach had to admit; a mistake he pledged not to repeat in the future.
He kept the woman’s $5,000 down payment; what was she going to do, report him to the BBB? She had no way to contact him anyway, the plan being for “George” to find her to collect the balance upon completion of the job. He hadn’t thought about it again until he read about the welder whose acetylene had caught fire right next door to where Bob had been electrocuted, and the detail that the homeowner too was recently widowed. To a man who murders for a living, that many sudden dead husbands raises a lot of red flags.
He found Winnie on Instagram, and it wasn’t hard to figure out which casino they were staying at—the one that pretended to be Paris.
Claire leapt out of bed as if it were filled with snakes, instead of just the one. She pulled most of the bedsheets to cover herself, entirely exposing George-slash-Zach, who made no attempt to cover up.
“No tattoos?” Winnie observed. “What kind of biker are you?”
“The Jewish kind. So, this a team effort? Some kind of ‘Strangers on a Train’-criss-cross-apple-sauce thing . . .? Or is it only one of you gets her kicks murdering husbands?”
Winnie looked at Claire. Claire shrugged, Really? George/Zach did a slow clap that further annoyed Claire.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“You cost me twenty-k.”
Claire expected better math from a man who charged $10,000 fees for his services, and who had a reasonable argument here for five, tops.
“And how do you figure that?”
“If I’d had the chance to execute your friend’s contract properly, she’d have been happy with my work and recommended me to your other friend, the one married to the welder,” he argued. “Word of mouth is the best advertising in my line of work. And you know what? She in turn might have referred me to another unhappy housewife,” he mused. “At ten-k each, that’s $30,000.”
“Housewife,” Claire repeated back. “None of us are married to houses, you decrepit misogynist.”
“None of you are married at all,” he reminded them, adding, “And I wasn’t so decrepit last night when I banged you from behind against the headboard.”
Claire should have been embarrassed, but she wasn’t. She was pleased by the freedom with which she’d expressed herself sexually last night, refusing to blame the mushrooms, alcohol and heady rush of gambling riches. This happened because she wanted it to, and she enjoyed it. It was unfortunate that it happened with this loathsome fellow, however handsome and considerate a lover he’d demonstrated himself to be.
“Even if I agreed,” she told him, “you forgot to subtract the five thousand Winnie already paid you.”
“Call it a bonus. Also, I should add my expenses. Plane ticket, cab fare, my gambling losses last night. The room I didn’t sleep in.”
“What’s going on . . .?” Becca asked sleepily. “Oh.”
“Hi,” Zach waved, still completely, nakedly exposed.
“This is Zach,” Winnie introduced him. “He’s a hitman.”
“Who’s blackmailing us,” Claire added.
“S’up?” said the croupier who’d bedded Becca, who at least had the good sense to put on one of the three plush bathrobes provided by the casino.
“Not now,” Becca said, shoving him from the room and closing the bedroom doors.
“Now, that’s not fair,” said Zach, getting out of bed and pulling on his briefs. “I explained my position. This is money I’m fairly owed.”
“How much . . .?” Becca asked the others as Zach continued to dress.
“$30,000,” Claire said.
“Plus expenses,” Zach added as he continued to dress.
“Expenses, what are you, a TV private detective?”
Claire had his $30,000. Hell, they’d won fifty, although the casino only paid out 76 percent, withholding the rest for taxes. So, $38,000. It would be worth all of it to rid themselves of him. But Claire understood: this man would keep coming back for more. She imagined how she might dispose of him. He’d be too wary to lure onto the balcony but, his bladder full, he was overdue for the bathroom, where a dropped towel on the wet floor might do the trick.
Instead, she went to the room safe and gave him his money. After he left, she sat with her head in her hands, knowing she was good and screwed, twice over.
Working backward from the most recent death, Sheriff Vargas could see that Frederick Williams, husband of Becca Williams, didn’t have much to recommend him. A reputation for philandering, a restraining order, detained for suspicion of soliciting prostitution, an out-of-court settlement for a civil suit alleging wrongful infection of an STD. The wife of Robert Edelstein, Winnie Jones (good for Winnie, keeping her surname after marriage), had claimed in recent weeks to have been injured in a car accident. But no report was ever filed with her insurance company, and Sheriff Vargas could find no signs of damage to the vehicle or record of repairs. The lie and the injuries squared with an abusive spouse—another dirtbag husband. Only Carl Weston seemed relatively blameless as a spouse, his death routine, attributed to natural causes. On the face of it, Claire Weston appeared completely innocent and not deserving of further investigation.
The sheriff’s inquiries revealed that the widow Winnie had purchased plane tickets for all three women, while Becca put the luxury suite on her Amex card. Claire had some solid friends. It was a coin toss for Sheriff Vargas to decide to start her investigation on Winnie or Becca. She went alphabetically, and found Becca to be a yammerer—a good memory for dates and places that suddenly got fuzzy when it came to whose idea Vegas was and who paid for what, and why her husband, a non-smoker, might have decided to take up vaping around his welding gear. Winnie, by contrast, was a clam. She offered little and when she didn’t like a question, she cooed baby-talk to her dog, which Ramona found both annoying and unhelpful. It took a while for Winnie to cop to her fabricated accident and the real reason for her injuries. Neither woman admitted to the severity of their husbands’ abuses, and both professed deep grief at their loss. Sheriff Vargas took them for liars; which was too bad, because she kind of liked them.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she told each of the widows, not meaning it for a second.
Claire Weston was likely a waste of time. Although maybe she’d contradict one of the others, however innocent she herself seemed to be.
And yet . . .
Two of the deaths had occurred at Claire’s home, the third just next door. It tugged at Sheriff Vargas’s suspicious nature. Who’s to say that Carl’s exhumed body, his death attributed to heart disease, might not instead bear traces of poisoning or other evidence of foul play? Alas, she’d learned that Carl’s remains had been cremated. Another thing to tug at Sheriff Vargas. And it was difficult to ignore Claire as beneficiary of her friends’ largesse—plane tickets and luxury suites—even if, as seemed likely, they all split expenses after winning a considerable sum at the tables. Did they feel as if they owed her? It was this final tug that brought the sheriff to Claire’s doorstep.
The first thing Claire had done on her return home from Las Vegas was saw a very neat fault line into the top step of her basement stairs. If and when Winnie’s rogue hitman returned to extort more money from her, she’d lure him to the basement safe that she did not have. If he survived the fall, a shovel would do the rest. She’d break a window from outside and report a burglary gone awry, summoning more pretend tears. Claire understood that another accidental death at her home was likely to attract suspicion, but it was preferable to having this Zach coming around to collect like some bimonthly trick-or-treater.
Wary of any knock on the door that might have been his, Claire was actually relieved to see Sheriff Ramona Vargas on her stoop. She invited the sheriff inside and considered opening a bottle of wine (Claire had definitely acquired a taste for good reds in recent months), but offered coffee instead. Ramona scattered a few pillows to settle into the plush couch.
“Nice sofa,” she said.
The sheriff offered condolences for the loss of Claire’s husband—she meant it this time—before asking a series of broad questions about the marriages of her friends, Winnie and Becca.
“Who knows what about other people’s marriages?” Claire replied. “I’m sure most people thought Carl and I were happy.”
The sheriff considered it surprising honesty in an inquiry about the possible murder of husbands . . . but also one that only an innocent person might feel comfortable to declare.
“Those two were not exactly husbands of the year,” Sheriff Vargas felt free to opine.
“Do you have a husband?”
“A wife.”
If only, Claire thought. Her time in the company of women had always been preferable to that of men, the most recent example being her idyllic long weekend in Vegas with her best female friends. Ruined afterward by a man. Although the time in between, in rapturous lovemaking, the man inside her (repeatedly), only clarified her unlikeliness as a lesbian.
“Lucky you,” she told the sheriff.
“Think we don’t fight? Like honey badgers. Just not to the death.”
“So far.”
Ramona laughed. One more widow she hadn’t expected to like. She asked a few more perfunctory questions, finished her coffee and said goodbye, conceding a probable
dead end in a job that had too many.
It had been weeks since Sheriff Vargas thought about the widows and their husbands, or Claire had thought about the sheriff, although Claire occasionally considered the unwelcome return of the hitman and extortionist, Zach. So when Claire heard the motorcycle engine outside her house one night, she knew exactly who it was. She hoped he might try to gain entry by breaking a window, saving her the trouble. Instead, he rang the doorbell.
Claire’s face registered her displeasure. Zachs, however, radiated warmth, and his smile reflected what seemed like real happiness to see her. Damn it, did he have to be so handsome?
“Claire,” he said. “May I call you Claire?”
“It’s my name.”
She noticed he was carrying a small bag, and did not wonder what was in it. It was empty, and he was here to fill it. She invited him in and asked if he’d like some wine.
“Only if I can watch you open and pour it,” he replied.
“I wonder if I should be offended, that you think I keep poison on hand just in case someone needs poisoning.”
“I think you’re a very resourceful person, and it would be foolish of anyone to underestimate you.”
“I keep the good wine downstairs,” she said, and headed for the basement. She hoped he’d follow and not notice her skipping the top step. Instead he waited politely for her in the kitchen. She returned, opened the bottle theatrically in front of him and poured.
“Cheers,” he raised his glass toward her. Claire declined the unwanted advance of his clink and drank.
“I suppose you want me to fill your bag. I have a few thousand dollars in a safe downstairs . . . “
“Oh, no. The bag is for you. It’s your $30,000, plus expenses. Plus the five I kept from Winnie,” he added. “That was wrong of me.”
Claire knew when men were full of crap, but only because they were most of the time. It didn’t require a special talent like Becca’s, counting cards or reciting pi or matching dates to days. But she couldn’t tell with Zach; so she looked inside the bag, and found it filled with money. Zach headed, uninvited, to the living room and settled into her couch, bracing his back with a plush pillow while draping his arm over another.
“Nice couch,” he said. “Look, I know you don’t want me here, so I’ll get right to the point. It’s not easy doing what I do . . . but not for the reasons people think.”
She knew it wasn’t guilt. When you’ve ruined someone’s life so badly they want you dead, you deserve what’s coming to you.
“Frankly, it’s as boring as any other repetitive job. Oh, maybe not the first couple of times. There’s a lot of adrenaline, fear of getting caught, rushing in and away as fast as you can. Eventually, you settle into a routine. You might as well be picking fruit, pulling coffee, fitting people for eyeglasses.”
He took a long swallow of wine. She matched him, curious where this was going.
“The planning also becomes routine. Where and when. How. Almost always, a gun. Except when it has to be quiet. Sometimes I’ll garrote a guy. You know what that is, a garrote?”
“It was popular in Victorian England with roadside bandits. Also, the Spanish used it in executions.”
“God, I love a smart woman. Don’t meet many in my line of work.”
“Or hanging out in biker bars, I imagine.”
“Where was I?”
“Where and when and how.”
“Right. Never why. You—you do the why. Husbands who deserve it. It’s very pure. Mission oriented.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, you think this is some kind of sting, I’m wearing a wire? Tell you what . . .” he said, taking off his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. “Just to put your mind at ease.”
God, he was fit. When did Claire become so filled with lust? He stepped out of his shoes, slipped off his socks and wriggled free of his pants, and she refilled her glass.
“Satisfied?” he asked, clad only in briefs.
She wasn’t. She felt like telling him that it would take more than just seeing him to satisfy her. She felt herself flush with heat and desire. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his briefs.
“I suppose I could have some state-of-the-art recording device in my briefs.”
“It seems like they can do anything now,” she agreed. “The technology is incredible.”
With that, he dropped his underwear to the floor.
“Here’s the thing,” he continued, naked, staring at her unabashed. “When I left Vegas . . .”
“With our money.”
“Again, I apologize. It was wrong. Anyway, work was starting to feel like a grind. So I thought, how can I be a little more creative? I started asking myself on hits, ‘What would Claire do?’”
“Excuse me?”
He told Claire about the man who drove a Camaro, and how he’d changed all four tires when the man was out, replacing them with completely bald tires from the junkyard. The ensuing crash was quite dramatic. The roofer was easy; all he had to do was loosen some shingles at his upcoming job. The guesswork was anticipating where the roofer might start, and Zach had guessed properly. The lawyer who swam alone at night, the painter who stored flammable acetone in his garage. He had an upcoming hit on a man who ice-fished over a hole on a frozen lake . . .
“Is his name Neal?” Claire asked.
“It is! Friend of yours?”
“His wife, Fran.”
“She seems nice. Look, I don’t want to step on any toes. If you sure you want to do it yourself . . .?”
“It’s nice of you to ask,” she replied. “But no.”
“Professional courtesy,” Zach said. “I’ll offer a Friends of Claire discount instead.”
He raised his glass to her. This time, she toasted him back.
“So that’s it. I just wanted you to know. I feel like I have a better work-life balance, thanks to you. I’m not only more creatively fulfilled at my job, but the accidental nature of these hits makes it less likely I’ll get caught and sent to prison. And all because of you.”
Zach set his glass down and approached her, gently taking her glass from her and setting it on the table. He turned his face inches from hers.
“May I kiss you goodbye?”
She stared into his dark eyes.
“No,” she said. A look of hurt passed across that handsome face of his. “But you can kiss me.”
He did. She reached down and held him, back-walking him into the couch where they fell into a dozen plush pillows, and made love. Afterward, Claire led him upstairs and they made love again, settling into cozy post-coital banter about fanciful ways to do in Neal.
“I could use a trebuchet to launch a boulder onto the ice,” Zach suggested. “Or drop it from a helicopter.”
“That seems like a lot. What about a small toy car with a stick of dynamite? All the evidence would fall into the lake along with the broken ice and Neal.”
“In fairness, so would the boulder.”
Claire fell asleep in his arms.
When she awakened in the middle of the night, Zach was gone from her bed. Her first instinct was that he’d had a change of heart, took his bag of money and left. But from her bedroom window she could see his motorcycle still in her driveway. She headed downstairs to find the bag of money still in the kitchen where she’d left it. That’s when she noticed the basement door was open.
She found Zach at the bottom of the stairs. He was face down near the shovel that proved to be unnecessary. He was dressed and Claire had to wonder, was he looking for her safe, to rob her and slip away? Was he looking for another bottle of wine? Did he have a tendency to sleep walk?
Claire wandered outside and listlessly broke a window, then called the number on the card Sheriff Vargas had left her. She washed one wine glass and put it away, plumped some sofa pillows and went upstairs and dressed, awaiting the sheriff’s arrival. As Ramona reviewed the scene, she asked Claire if she knew the man, and she replied that she’d never seen him before. He carried no identification, and when Ramona ran his license plate, it didn’t match his motorcycle. At least she got a chalk outline this time. All pretty disturbing stuff to an innocent civilian. Ramona expected Claire, recently widowed and living alone, to be scared and rattled by the break in; she was unprepared for the profound sadness Claire seemed to exude instead.
Seeing the sheriff’s car from her house next door, Becca came to look in on her friend. She told them she’d seen the motorcycle and had wondered about it, but didn’t want to appear nosy. She said she heard a window break just under an hour ago, which suggested a much shorter timeline than the one Claire had offered. The detail tugged at Ramona. She felt tugged at again when the body was brought upstairs and Becca went wide-eyed.
“You know this man?” the sheriff asked.
“Sorry. No,” Becca stammered. “My first dead body.”
“Besides your husband, all burned up.”
Becca clammed up, and the sheriff departed with the body. She’d had enough of these widows; she’d keep an eye on Claire, but had a wife to get home to.
Becca told Winnie what happened and both admired Claire’s bravery at facing down the home invasion, and dispatching the hitman once and for all. Winnie had hoped George/Zach might show up a year from now, when Thor was large enough to rip out his throat. Claire never told Becca or Winnie what really happened that night—why Zach was there or what had transpired between them. That made sharing the money difficult to explain. Instead, she sent it to her son. Maybe he and his wife would feel better about starting a family, and inviting grandma to visit sometime.
A few days later, Claire sat alone and opened a mediocre bottle of wine. The good ones were in the basement, and Claire wasn’t quite ready to go down there yet. Sipping her glass and pulling thoughtlessly at a pillow, she thought about how she might finish the job Zach didn’t get around to, sending Neal and his fishing line under the ice.
Zach would have liked that.
Ken Pisani is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and member of the Writers Guild of America West. His debut novel “AMP’D,” published by St. Martin’s Press, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Ken has also contributed fiction and non-fiction to The Saturday Evening Post, Salon, Publishers Weekly, Huffington Post, Literary Hub, Washington Independent Review of Books, Carve, Cedar Hills Press, The Writer, Defenestration, Stymie, Hollywood Dementia, Flash Fiction Online and the anthology More Tonto Short Stories, published in the US and UK. He recently completed a new novel, Days Are Here Again (no publication date yet). Visit kenpisani.com
